


Weighed in the Balance

by devovitsuasartes



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Afterlife, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Fantasy, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-11-01 15:55:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10925121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devovitsuasartes/pseuds/devovitsuasartes
Summary: Mickey is seventeen years old, and Mickey is dead.





	Weighed in the Balance

It’s a routine job - some club owner who borrowed money from the Milkoviches when his business was in trouble, and who’s been too slow with the payments - but it gives Mickey the shakes anyway. Because what Terry didn’t tell them was that this club is actually a gay bar. In fact, Mickey’s pretty sure the guy isn’t actually late on his payments. He’s pretty sure that this is just an excuse for a fag bash.

So yeah, Mickey has the shakes.

Not on the outside. He used to shake on the outside, but now at most his little finger will twitch involuntarily as his stomach turns over, and he'll feel an overwhelming urge to yell or to punch something. The guy’s in the back office and to get there… to get there they have to walk past all these dancers.

Colin glances back at Mickey, smirking. He raises a hand to chest level and then affects a limp wrist and a mince. Mickey just grimaces back at him, and hopes to god that Colin interprets his expression as one of disgust.

That’s when the red-haired dancer catches Mickey’s eye.

He’s young - too young to be working here, probably. He has smooth, pale, creamy skin laid over his bones and muscles, and it moves with them as he dances, creating dips and hollows and bulges. He’s wearing these embarrassing gold boots and gold shorts and a gold necklace tie, and objectively Mickey knows that the guy looks like an idiot, but he can’t stop staring.

The dancer is looking at them, probably wondering what this procession of torn-sleeved thugs is doing in a place like this. And because Mickey is looking up at him, it’s Mickey’s eye that he catches. The dancer smiles at whatever expression he sees on Mickey’s face, then does this… _thing_. Mickey doesn’t even know what the name for it is. It’s like his whole body ripples - a movement that starts at his shoulders and rolls down his chest and torso to his groin. He does it again, and again, never taking his eyes off Mickey.

Distracted, Mickey ends up walking into a couple who are making out. He could swear that he hears a muffled laugh behind him as he shoves the two guys angrily, snarling at them to get out of his way. It’s not until they’re almost off the dance floor that Mickey risks another glance back, and he sees the dancer on his knees, his upper body tilted back seductively as an older man fumbles a fistful of bills into the redhead’s shorts. Mickey is far away now, and it could be his imagination, but he’s sure that he catches a glimpse of copper curls of hair beneath those shorts as they’re pulled away from his stomach.

The shakes are back, and more violent than ever. Mickey hurries into the back office with his brother and cousins, and together they beat the shit out of the club owner - his cries drowned out by the techno music.

On the way out, Mickey doesn’t dare look up. He stares stubbornly at the ground, even when they pass the platform where he knows the dancer was stationed. He’s determined to move past this, but in the end it doesn’t matter. The dancer seals his fate.

-

Mickey’s usually careful when he beats off. He watches straight porn, so that if someone walks in on him (his door has a pretty clear FUCK OFF sign, but his family has a tendency to ignore it) they’ll just assume that he’s getting off on the bouncing tits and bald pussies. Really, though, Mickey’s looking at the cocks.

He fucking loves looking at cocks. Jesus Christ. Cut, uncut, who cares? Mickey could look at cocks for hours and not get bored. He likes big cocks and skinny cocks and dark cocks and red angry-looking cocks. The cocks are usually all he ever sees of the guys in porn - just their cocks and their pudgy, hairy bellies as they pound some squealing blonde - but Mickey has managed to get off on a lot less than that.

After they get back from the club and Mickey shuts himself in his room, he starts whacking off to a video he had saved on his laptop - boring, but it usually gets the job done. Not tonight, though. Tonight, Mickey can’t stop thinking about that goddamn dancer and the way his body moved and his lazy, knowing smile. And so when it becomes clear that the usual stimulus isn’t going to get the job done, Mickey plugs his earphones into his laptop and goes hunting on the web.

The shakes are back. His fingertips skid over the keys as he types in the address of a free porno site. He glances over his shoulder at the closed door anxiously, and his heart pounds as he navigates to the gay section of the website. Mickey slowly types in “R-E-D-H-E-A-D” in the search bar and within a few seconds he’s presented with a wealth of options - redheads getting fucked, redheads doing the fucking, redheads jerking off, redheads doing complicated stuff involving swings and dildos...

Mickey settles on one of the solo videos, rationalizing that jerking off to this is somehow less gay than jerking off to two guys butt-fucking. It’s an amateur video - a little fuzzy, and shot from a fixed, imperfect angle like the guy just tossed his camcorder onto his desk in his eagerness to get started. Even the unclear movements are beautifully suggestive, though, and Mickey lets out a long breath that he didn’t know he was holding as he starts to mimic the movements of the guy on the screen, his hand moving slowly inside his boxers.

A few minutes in he hears low-level, tinny noises from the video and curiously turns the volume up on his laptop. His breath catches as he listens to the quiet, slick sounds of skin-on-skin, and to the quiet, breathy moans of the guy in the video. Mickey slips his free hand down behind the one that’s working his cock and massages his taint, his asshole, rolling his fingers against them as he pulls himself closer, and closer…

‘WHAT THE _FUCK_?’

Mickey feels the pain before he actually sees his father. Distantly, he’s aware of the laptop being smashed against a wall, the motion ripping the headphones free so that the shameful sounds of the porno blast through the speakers. Mickey is awash with sickness and terror, trying feebly to pull his boxers back up even as his father drags him out of the room, bare-cocked, by the collar of his shirt.

‘Dad, wait, wait…’ Mickey pleads, but then a heavy fist smashes into his cheek, snaps his head to the side, and leaves him too stunned to continue. Fuzzily, he tries to focus on Terry’s furious red face as it hovers over him, tries to listen to what his father is saying.

‘Faggot!’ Terry Milkovich snarls, fumbling in his waistband for something. Mickey tries to surge away when he sees what it is - a gun - but his father pins him to the floor with one hand around Mickey’s throat. All the while he’s saying the same thing over and over: ‘Faggot! Fucking faggot! Faggot!’

Then Terry pistol-whips him, and everything is bright and distant for a moment. Before the pain comes rushing in Mickey feels a bizarre sense of relief that his worst nightmare has come to life, and now he doesn’t have to fear it any more.

‘Faggot!’ Terry bellows, and hits Mickey again with the butt of his gun.

‘Fucking faggot!’ He does it again, and this time Mickey feels his skull break and hot blood trickling down into his hair and his ear.

 _Oh shit_ , Mickey thinks, his own voice clear and eerily calm inside his battered head. _He’s killing me_.

Then, with the next blow of the gun, he’s gone.

-

The dancer is sitting on the stoop of the Milkovich house, basking in the warm sunlight with his eyes closed and his long legs stretched out lazily. He’s dressed properly now - in a T-shirt and jeans and sneakers - and the bright rays of the sun pick out a dozen different tones of red and orange and crimson and copper in his hair.

‘Aye!’ Mickey calls out, for want of something better to do. ‘You’re trespassing.’

The dancer opens his eyes, squints at Mickey. ‘Says who?’

‘This is my goddamn house.’

‘Not yet.’

Mickey is about to come up with a threat, or a retort, or maybe just punch the guy in his beautiful face. But then he looks around and he realizes that, yeah, his house looks kind of different. There are a few scrappy flowers in the patch of lawn out front, instead of just piles of rusting junk, and the paint looks a lot newer than he ever remembers seeing it.

The dancer stands up, stretches, then buries his hands in his jeans pockets and saunters over to Mickey. ‘You’re dead,’ he says, in what he probably think is a kind voice.

‘Yeah, no shit, Sherlock,’ Mickey snaps.

‘Sorry, I have to say it out loud. Policy.’ The dancer doesn’t elaborate on this policy, or who came up with it.

Mickey glares at him suspiciously. ‘So who the fuck are you, when you’re not grinding on old guys’ viagra dicks?’

The dancer ducks his head, smiles like he didn’t mean or expect to. ‘I’m here to handle your exit paperwork.’

‘Exit… the fuck?’

‘Figure out where you’re supposed to be.’

‘Where I’m…’ Mickey rolls this over in his head, then takes a big step back - right into the empty street outside his house. ‘You gonna try and judge me, bitch?’

The dancer shrugs apologetically. ‘Sorry. It’s my job.’

‘The fuck it is, I don’t have to put up with this shit!’ And with that, Mickey flips the bird with both hands and whirls around abruptly - starts stomping away up the street.

Only the dancer is already there.

He reaches out, all business, and shoves his hand inside Mickey’s chest. Closes his hand around Mickey’s heart, cradles it in his long fingers, and carefully draws it out of Mickey’s body. Mickey staggers backwards, gasping, rubbing at his freshly emptied chest. There’s no sign of forced entry, but he can feel the absent place inside him.

‘It’s my job,’ the dancer repeats, Mickey’s heart cupped in his hand.

Mickey looks down at his heart. He doesn’t know much about anatomy, but he knows that it’s way too small and it’s beating way too fast. It’s an odd color too - dove grey. If Mickey wasn’t already dead, he’d be worried that he might have a heart condition.

He wants to rage and swear and punch the dancer, but Mickey can’t stop staring at his heart. And instead of launching into a tirade, all he can do is ask, ‘Why’s it so small?’

In lieu of an answer, the dancer gestures with the hand holding Mickey’s heart, and Mickey turns to see a beat-up old car driving up the road. He vaguely remembers this car - it sputtered its last when he was just a kid and got reduced to spare parts. But now it’s whole again and carrying two - no, three passengers.

Mickey takes a step back in instinctive fear when Terry Milkovich - younger, but still fuck-ugly - climbs out of the driver’s side door. There’s a cigarette clamped between his lips, and he looks vaguely irritated. Then, from the passenger side… Mickey’s mom, with a small bundle nestled in the crook of her arm. Terry marches straight into the house, leaving her to struggle.

Instinctively, Mickey steps forward to help his mom, but she doesn’t seem to see him. She swears under her breath as she slams the car door shut, and the bundle in her arms starts to grizzle. Mickey can just make out a tuft of dark hair and a red, wrinkly forehead. He looks back over his shoulder at the dancer, who smiles at him a little sadly and says:

‘Mickey Milkovich, this is your life.’

-

Mickey is four years old, and Mandy is three. They’re playing in the back yard. Mickey finds his little sister whiny and irritating, so on a whim he shoves her hard and sends her sprawling onto the asphalt, grazing her knee.

Mandy cries and cries and cries.

The dancer looks down at the heart in his hand - bigger now, but still so tiny - and as Mickey watches he sees a bloom of fresh darkness in its coloring. The dancer doesn’t say anything, but the infinitesimal press of his lips together tells Mickey exactly what this means.

‘That’s fucking bullshit!’ he explodes, yelling to be heard over Mandy’s wails. ‘I was a fucking kid. You’re gonna blame me for something I did when I was four?’

‘I have to be thorough,’ the dancer replies, an apology in his voice, if not in his words. ‘It’s policy.’

‘Fuck your policy!’ Mickey snaps, and as he does so he swears the heart darkens a little more.

-

Mickey is five years old, and he’s just started school. He doesn’t have a pencil case or anything of his own, so the teacher has given him a pair of scissors with rounded ends and some glue, so he can work on his art project.

But Mickey isn’t interested in art. He’s fascinated by the dreadlocks of the girl in front of him. And in a sudden burst of impulsive meanness, he reaches out with the scissors and snips three of them clean off.

‘Come on, that’s a classic,’ Mickey pleads, even as he watches his heart darken in the dancer’s hand. ‘I probably learned that from TV. You can’t blame me for that.’

The dancer looks at Mickey calmly. His eyes are big, and green, and when he’s this close Mickey can see that even his eyelashes are ginger. ‘Who else should we blame?’ he asks, not harshly.

Mickey doesn’t have an answer.

-

‘Look, you can quit with the fucking song and dance,’ Mickey snaps at last. ‘I know where I’m going. I know what color my fucking heart is. So can we just get on with it?’

‘It’s…’

‘Policy, right. You’re a fucking dick, you know that?’

Mickey is eight years old. He and Iggy are running around the Milkovich living room with Nerf Blasters that they stole off some neighborhood kids (Mickey had just watched a fresh spill of inky darkness soak his heart for the sin). The two of them are yelling the worst curse words that they know, really disgusting stuff, when Iggy forgets to look where he’s going and careens into the TV, knocking it off the end table with a resounding crash. The TV lands on its side, the cracked screen spitting stray sparks.

Iggy stares at Mickey, his eyes wide and terrified. They can both hear footsteps thundering down the hall. And Mickey - eight years old, wearing a too-big T-shirt that’s full of holes - sets his soft jawline firmly and grabs the guns off Iggy, shoves him in the direction of the back door so he can get away before Terry arrives.

Mickey has to turn away, then. He can’t look at this kid’s face, with its mix of fear and resignation, as he prepares for the punishment to come. But even looking away, he still hears his own arm breaking as Terry throws him against the wall. He still hears the big, gulping, childish sobs of pain.

And in the dancer’s hand, Mickey’s growing heart lightens - just a shade, like a shaft of sunlight fell across it.

-

Mickey is ten years old, and he’s carefully putting a litter of orphaned kittens into a cardboard box and carrying them to the local shelter. He desperately wants to keep one, but he knows that Terry will kill them if he finds them in the Milkovich house.

Mickey is twelve. He and his brothers have cornered the fat kid in their class on his way home, and they’re punching and kicking him and pulling up his shirt to expose his quaking belly. Mickey laughs and laughs and laughs while the kid begs for mercy.

Mickey is twelve and a half. He cheats on a math test. When the teacher catches him, he spits in her face and calls her a whore. Later, he beats up the kid he was cheating off.

Mickey is thirteen. Mandy just got her period and she’s too embarrassed to ask their dad for money to buy pads, so Mickey steals some out of girls’ backpacks at school. He leaves them on Mandy’s bed, runs out of the room with his cheeks burning.

Mickey is fourteen. He loses his virginity to his gym teacher and oh, it hurts like hell. Afterwards he threatens to call the cops, call the principal, call the guy’s wife - just for the amusement of seeing a grown man weep.

Mickey is nearly fifteen. He hears a rumor that some guy in school has been talking shit about his family, so Mickey brings a shiv to school and stabs the guy in the arm five times before the teachers pull him off. Turns out he got the wrong guy, but Mickey still gets sent to juvie.

Mickey is fifteen. He and this other kid in juvie have been jerking each other off, but when the kid leans in for a kiss Mickey punches him in the face, over and over again, until the kid is spitting teeth and wailing thickly. Mickey gets another few months added to his sentence.

Mickey is sixteen. His sixteenth birthday, in fact. Terry puts a gun in his hand, holds another gun to his head, and forces Mickey to shoot a man. Afterwards, he makes Mickey dig a hole to bury the guy in. The blisters from the shovel bite into Mickey’s palms, but he grits his teeth and gets on with the job at hand.

Mickey is seventeen, beating up the owner of a gay bar with the rest of the Milkovich clan. He doesn’t know why they’re doing it. He doesn’t care.

Mickey is seventeen years old, and Mickey is dead.

-

They’re sitting at the kitchen table now. The house is just as it was the day Mickey died - unwashed dishes in the sink and all - but it’s eerily quiet.

The dancer sets a pair of scales on the table, the metal so shiny that Mickey can see his face reflected in it. Delicately, the dancer sets a long, white feather down on one side of the scale. Into the bowl of the other, he places Mickey’s dark, murky, heavy heart.

The bowl hits the surface of the table with a dull _gong_ noise. The feather quivers where it’s elevated in the air.

‘This is a fucking bullshit test,’ Mickey snaps, his arms folded sulkily. ‘It’s rigged.’

‘I don’t completely disagree,’ the dancer concedes.

‘Does that mean you’ll let me off?’

‘Ha.’

Mickey clenches his fists. He wracks his brain for everything he knows about religion, and comes up short. But he does have some vague memory of an old black-and-white movie that played on TV when he was half-asleep, and a knight playing a game of chess with Death.

‘Yo,’ he says, leaning forward across the table. ‘How about we make this interesting?’

‘It takes a lot to interest me,’ the dancer replies. But there are mischievous creases at the corners of his mouth and eyes. ‘What are you suggesting.’

Mickey rolls up his sleeves briskly. ‘Fist fight. No weapons. No… special powers shit, if you have any of that. You and me, right now. And if I win, I get to live.’

The dancer is definitely intrigued by the proposal, but he’s still trying to play it cool. ‘And if I win?’

Mickey hesitates. ‘You get to send me to Hell or wherever.’

‘But I was going to do that anyway.’

‘Ugh, fine.’ Mickey casts around for stuff that he can offer, that a grim reaper might like, but his current form doesn’t really have much in the way of possessions. ‘What do you want?’

The dancer shrugs laconically. Mickey can see his interest fading.

‘OK, OK, OK, just wait…’ But Mickey doesn’t have anything to offer. He’s empty-handed. He’s even empty-chested.

He looks down at the ugly lump of meat weighing down one side of the scales. ‘How about that?’ he offers dejectedly, fully expecting the dancer to wrinkle his nose and turn down the offer.

But the red-haired man has perked up again. ‘Your heart?’ he asks incredulously.

‘Yeah. Is it worth anything?’

The dancer seems uncertain of how exactly to answer, so Mickey picks up his heart from the scales and holds it in his hand. It’s cold and heavy and slimy, leaving inky smears on Mickey’s fingers. He can’t imagine that it’s worth much, but it’s all that he has to barter with now.

‘I’ll put this on the table,’ he offers. ‘Hell, I wasn’t really using it anyway.’

‘OK,’ the dancer agrees, a little too quickly for Mickey’s liking. He can’t help but wonder if this is a bad deal somehow. But shit, looking at the state of his heart, Mickey can’t imagine that he’s giving up much.

They push the table up against the wall and stack the chairs on top of it, which leaves them with a decent little space to fight in. Mickey throws the first punch, but the dancer ducks under it easily and jabs Mickey in the kidneys. He’s fast, and he fights dirty: pulling Mickey’s hair, gouging at his eyes with strong fingers, doing his level best to kick Mickey in the balls. But the more they fight, the angrier Mickey gets. And the angrier he gets, the more he wants to live.

He tangles his fingers in the dancer’s hair, the ginger strands soft and silky. Mickey slams the dancer’s head against the side of the fridge - once, twice, three times - and to his satisfaction he manages to draw blood. It’s a short-lived triumph, though, as the dancer kicks Mickey’s legs out from under him, knocks him to the floor.

The dancer is sprawled on top of Mickey in a bastardized version of a wrestling move. He’s sweating and bleeding, his pale skin flushed and his hair sticking up wildly.

‘Say uncle!’ the dancer demands, his voice rough.

Mickey writhes like an angry cat. ‘Fuck you!’ he hisses back, trying to ignore the pain in his wrist.

‘Say it! Say uncle and I’ll let you go!’

‘Yeah, you’ll let me go to Hell! I don’t _think so_.’

With the last two words Mickey successfully wraps his legs around the dancer’s and rolls them over. In a bold gambit he snatches for his opponent’s hand, snags the middle finger, and bends it backwards viciously.

‘Say uncle!’ Mickey echoes mockingly.

‘Ow,’ the dancer whimpers, and Mickey sees tears welling in his eyes. For a moment he falters, but then he remembers that he’s literally fighting for his life, and bends the dancer’s finger back more. He can practically hear the bones creaking now.

‘Say it!’

There’s a whine of pain and protest. Then, in a quiet rush, ‘Uncle, uncle, uncle…’

Mickey lets go. He rolls off the dancer, panting. The kitchen tiles are cool against his back, and his head is hurting, his head is hurting so bad…

‘Faggot!’

_Oh. Oh no. Not again._

Mickey opens his eyes. His dad is on top of him, red-faced and furious, the gun clenched in his hand and readied for another blow. As it falls, Mickey twists his head away abruptly.

The noise of the gunshot perforates his eardrum.

-

The cops don’t really look like they buy the story of Terry Milkovich accidentally shooting himself with his own gun, but they also don’t really look like they care. Everyone at the station has had to drag Terry into jail on more than one occasion, and the lazy porkers are probably happy that there’s one less regular task for them on the South Side beat.

None of Terry’s kids cry about it. They scrounge up enough money to get the body cremated, but they tell the crematorium to keep the ashes.

‘Use ‘em for fertilizer or some shit,’ Mandy says in a bitter, strained voice. ‘We don’t want him.’

Mickey’s face heals, slowly, but it’s the headaches that are really crippling. He knows that he should probably go and see a doctor, but instead he downs prescription painkillers that he bought off Iggy and tries to sleep through the worst of it. He has awful nightmares - memories of nasty shit from his childhood, and flashes of a blackened heart in a brass bowl. For a while Mickey thinks that maybe Terry gave him a brain tumor as a parting gift, but after a while both the headaches and the nightmares fade away.

It’s six months after the incident when Mickey finally works up the courage to go back to the gay bar - back to where that night started. Even though his dad is dead, and Mickey has told his brother and sister why exactly Terry tried to kill him, he still gets the shakes as he looks up at the gawdy neon sign.

‘Hey. You’re trespassing.’

Mickey almost shakes out of his skin. He clenches his fists instinctively, turns around to find the source of the challenge. But what he finds is a soft, teasing smile and a shock of red hair.

‘Kidding,’ the dancer assures him, shrugging his way into a thick coat. ‘Sorry, I saw you staring at the place like you wanted to murder it. You looking for someone?’

Mickey stamps his boots in the snow, to try and cover his embarrassment. ‘Nah, I just… Nah.’

The dancer’s smile widens, and he walks a little closer, shoving gloved hands into his pocket. ‘Hey, I know you. You came by the club earlier this year. Beat the shit out of my boss.’

He doesn’t sound angry, but Mickey is on edge. ‘So what?’

The dancer shrugs. ‘So nothing. He’s an asshole. Probably deserved it.’ He takes another step forward. His skin is pale and smooth; his mouth looks soft and amused. ‘I’m Ian,’ he offers.

‘Didn’t ask,’ Mickey snaps.

The dancer’s face falls, and for the first time he looks uncertain. ‘Oh. Sorry, I assumed you were…’

‘What?’

‘You know.’ Ian glances up at the rainbow-colored neon sign. ‘Gay.’

Mickey nearly punches the guy out of habit. It actually takes a second or two for him to realize that it’s not meant as an insult, and in that second or two the dancer has already turned away and started untangling a pair of headphones.

Mickey takes a deep breath. Reminds himself that Terry is dead. Tells himself that no one else cares.

‘I, uh. I am,’ he says, quietly, cringing at himself.

Ian looks back.

‘I’m gay,’ Mickey affirms, his voice stronger now. He lifts his chin, daring Ian to mock him. Instead, the dancer just smiles.

‘I’m headed this way,’ he says. ‘Want to walk with me for a bit?’

Mickey lives in the opposite direction. ‘Yeah, OK.’

They walk away from the club, side-by-side, heads ducked against the cold wind. The snow soon fills in the footprints they left behind.


End file.
